Here’s the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual. That sentence should be written in capital letters. Every person is unique – and not just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership cannot capture that variability. Period.
When should you push back against oppression, despite the danger? When you start nursing secret fantasies of revenge; when your life is being poisoned and your imagination fills with the wish to devour and destroy.
Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it. Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.
Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is and you should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy. And maybe you don’t want it to be.
Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization – this simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks.
But success makes us complacent. We forget to pay attention. We take what we have for granted. We turn a blind eye. We fail to notice that things are changing, or that corruption is taking root. And everything falls apart. Is that the fault of reality – of God? Or do things fall apart because we have not paid sufficient attention.
Violence, after all, is no mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.
It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons.
You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.
It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality.
It is because of of Freud, Jung, Nietzsche – and Orwell – that I always wonder, “What, then, do you stand against?” whenever I hear someone say, too loudly, “I stand for this!” The question seems particularly relevant if the same someone is complaining, criticizing, or trying to change someone else’s behaviour.
Imagine a toddler repeatedly striking his mother in the face. Why would he do such a thing? It’s a stupid question. It’s unacceptably naive. The answer is obvious. To dominate his mother. To see if he can get away with it. Violence, after all, is no mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default.
The body, with its various parts, needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.
Limit the rules.
The “natural” human tendency to respond to the stranger, the strange idea and the creative individual with fear and aggression can be more easily comprehended, once it is understood that these diverse phenomena share categorical identity with the “natural disaster.
Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned.
People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves.
I have clients who are nowhere near as insane as their family is, but they’re the people who have been targeted with the mental illnesses because that’s convenient for everyone involved.
When you are fighting against something than there’s something else you are not doing.
He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.